#is something insurmountable in validating queerness

[deimosatellite]

like idk it just seems actually nefarious to take one of the very few widely known instances of queerness in older history being a symbol to show queer people that we've always existed and aren't alone for CENTURIES and taking away the queerness from it. like. i know some people say that ''the queerness isnt important in the book" which i mean in my opinion i could go off for 10k words in an essay as to how basil's love for dorian is integral to the story BUT EVEN APART from that its really just. having a real explicitly queer character in such an old and widely regarded classic novel is HUGE for queer history and this is just. literally like. its 2024. why are you doing queer erasure to DORIAN GRAY

[weilongfu]

I know this is pretty vague but could you write something for my pistachio if you've seen it. I just recently found it and even though it's short I love it~

M-My Pistachio? You... You have... come to me... to request a My Pistachio prompt... AHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! ANON... If you look up My Pistachio on AO3, you’ll find exactly 3 fics. All 3 are mine.

You have come to the right place. You are welcome here. You are safe, loved, and valid here. Bless you, Anon, for supporting independent queer Korean media. Here’s a prompt fill for you. And may you always tread lightly on the Earth. (/ominous blessings)

------

It had not been long since Mu Yeong had started dating Han Bit. At least in Mu Yeong’s eyes, the passing of six months had not been so long. Calling Han Bit, “hyung,” without flinching had been considered a major achievement. Shopping for their first ever Christmas together, on the other hand, was suddenly an insurmountable challenge.

“Hyuuuunggggg, just tell me what you want for Christmas,” Mu Yeong whined. 

“What would the fun in that be?” Han Bit ruffled Mu Yeong’s hair as he continued to string up fairy lights around their shared apartment. Moving in had been the easiest thing of all, which surprised both of them. “Besides, we’ve been together for six months now. Surely you can think of something.”

“Eh heh... Hyung is right... Surely... Something...”

“Mu Yeong, it’s just a present. Not a stage performance.” 

“But... I want it to be good. I want it to be perfect.”

Han Bit sighed and finished with the string of lights in his hands before squishing Mu Yeong’s face between his palms. “Whatever you gift me, as long as it comes from your heart, I promise to cherish.” 

Mu Yeong pouted. “Why is it everything hyung says sound like a line?”

“I’m a playwright, Mu Yeong-ah. It comes with the territory.”

------

At last Christmas had come and Mu Yeong and Han Bit made the first order of business opening their presents for each other. Han Bit handed over a rather small box. Mu Yeong opened it to find a silver bracelet with a charm that looked like a film slate on it.

“Just a token,” Han Bit had explained as he put the bracelet on Mu Yeong’s wrist. “Unfortunately, they didn’t have anything that looked like a script. But see, I have the same one.” Han Bit pulled out a chain from around his neck and showed off his copy of the same charm. Mu Yeong wanted to melt. “Now you make sure you tell everyone that you’re taken.”

“I told you! Jun Myeon-ssi is just a junior. He doesn’t mean anything!”

“Yeah yeah.” Han Bit waved it off. “So? What did you get me?”

Mu Yeong slowly pulled out a moderately sized box out from behind him. Han Bit took it eagerly and with much thanks. He tore it open and began to laugh before dumping out the contents. Bags of roasted pistachios, pistachio nut brittle, pistachio marzipan balls covered in chocolate, pistachio cookies, pistachio shortbread, pistachio crackers, a whole host of pistachio themed items ending with a pair of pajamas with little dancing pistachio nuts emerged from the box. Mu Yeong covered his burning face, but no admonishments came. Instead the joyous laughter and rustling of packages continued as Han Bit sorted out all the pistachio snacks into different piles.

“H-Hyung?”

“Mu Yeong, this is as perfect as I thought it would be.” Han Bit eagerly pulled Mu Yeong into a kiss, soft and sweet, just barely flavored with pistachio and rose water. Apparently he’d broken into the pistachio marzipan already. “A very good gift. Merry Christmas to me.”

Mu Yeong smiled. “Merry Christmas, Han Bit-yah.”

[nandalorian]

Since I posted my thoughts about how Roswell has adequately represented queer men on the show and completely shit the bed on their representation of most everything else, I need to address the epically fucked-up treatment of female queerness and the queer female gaze in the context of Isobel and Rosa. This has been bugging me for a few weeks, and the reveal of Noah as the fourth alien pretty much cemented my feelings on the matter. I know there are people who feel the way I do about it, but if there’s another post on the subject I just haven’t seen, please link me. And if you disagree completely about this too, that’s cool. Let’s discuss.

While in my last post I applauded the show on its treatment of Michael’s bisexuality, I still don’t feel great about the introduction of a Michael/Alex/Maria love triangle. It’s one thing for Carina to double down on her defense of love triangles and insist they are not an overused and biphobic trope in popular media--news flash, it is, and in this case it’s also potentially damaging to the one black woman on the show, who will almost certainly bear the brunt of fans’ ire for “stealing Michael away” if they go through with a Maria/Michael relationship. I’m sorry if I don’t take a random straight white woman’s insistence to the contrary as gospel. Saying your formative years were shaped by straight love triangles doesn’t change the fact that it’s an insulting trope to women and an outright damaging one to queers, not even taking into consideration how the two intersect, or further when you consider POC characters, etc. You can’t compare straight relationships with queer ones, in the same way you can’t compare white experiences with nonwhite ones. To insist otherwise denies a whole system of privilege that drastically shapes and influences people’s lived experiences. 

But that isn’t what I want to address, because it’s another thing altogether to come for female sexuality and queerness. If I was willing to maybe give Malex a pass on the good-intentions-written-badly front, this is a hill I’m ready to die on. Isobel’s arc in season 1 of RNM demonstrates a lack of understanding that these are identities equally vulnerable to attack, exploitation, and misrepresentation--maybe even more so--as male queerness. That the outrage about Malex drowns out this other but no less important conversation kind of reaffirms the point I’m trying to make.

More under the cut.

Female sexuality has always struggled to find positive representation in popular media, no matter the time period or culture. Compared to male sexuality, it is not taken seriously, always played against the male gaze, or disregarded altogether because it excludes men. Queer female desire challenges societal structures around male desire and sexuality because it just… doesn’t require men to function and in fact actively rejects them. This is obviously a problem because the patriarchy loves it when men are shown to be extraneous and irrelevant. 

A lot of us know what it is to be invalidated as queer women, socially and sexually. Put your hand up if you’re a woman (in which I include cis and trans women, of course) or nonbinary individual who desires women and has been told, oh, you just haven’t met the right man yet, or oh, you’re just putting on a show for male attention. We have all been there and experienced this kind of erasure to various degrees of aggressiveness. This refrain is especially loud for bisexual women, who suffer erasure and ridicule from queer and straight communities alike, but the fact is, women’s sexuality has always been portrayed as less than or dependent upon that of a man’s. That isn’t to say bisexual men don’t also experience bi erasure. They do, and this is as much a product of homophobia as it is the primacy of the queer male gaze even within queer spaces and contexts. But in this case I’m addressing that of female and nonbinary bi-erasure and biphobia.

Furthermore, the role of queer women in society and popular media has always been underrepresented compared to that of gay men, or seen as more harmless or less significant, groundbreaking, or offensive for a couple of reasons: namely that a lot of people have played down or played off the existence of female sexuality and desire because they doubt its validity to begin with, or it’s “allowed” because it’s desirable to the male gaze. In some ways this has worked in our favour because subversive or queer female behaviour and desire in media have been able to fly beneath the radar, but it’s still a symptom of a greater problem.

I include this preamble because the writers of Roswell New Mexico have stunningly managed to ignore or remain ignorant to this context. The straight women on the show are shown to express their sexuality in upfront or positive ways, even opening up conversations about kink and reversing gender roles, but often in problematic ways too. The show sometimes fails the Bechdel Test or reduces characters, especially WOC like Maria, to having no purpose but to desire male characters and be desired by them, or portrays them as unable to want sex without quickly falling in love the way Maria seemingly has done with Michael. They’ve known each other for over a decade, and yet Maria only catches feelings after they’ve had sex, a night that, supposedly, meant nothing to her but quickly is revealed not to be the case. Interesting.

But beyond even that, my beef is with the whole Isobel-might-be-bisexual-and-in-love-with-Rosa-Ortecho storyline. I was excited about it at first; I couldn’t believe our luck that we had not one, but two bisexual characters on the show, and one of them was a bisexual woman married to a really awesome and seemingly caring South Asian man. But it was not to be, and this to me is ridiculously tone deaf and offensive in light of the fact that she was possessed by a male alien the whole goddamn time.

This tells us two equally disturbing things about the writers’ take on the queer female gaze and queer female sexuality: a) according to them, in this context, it literally doesn’t exist, and b) it is wholly a product of and subject to the male gaze.

From the promo for 1x12 it looks like they are going to delve a little bit into the mindfuck around consent due to Noah effectively brainwashing/tricking Isobel into marrying him, but one aspect of this I’d be surprised if they acknowledge is how he has also robbed Isobel of agency over her own sexuality. Not only has she been in a nonconsensual relationship with Noah this whole time, but he’s stripped her of the ability to discern whether her desires are her own, including the possibility that she is bisexual. As a woman, how can Isobel take her own sexuality seriously/see it as valid when she’s been forced to reconcile with the fact that, until now, it hasn’t been?

And that’s not even scratching the surface of the fact that a man used a woman, against her will and without her knowledge, to kill another woman. All over the simple fact that Rosa didn’t desire him/Isobel by extension. This stupid-as-fuck storyline is literally about weaponizing queer female sexuality in order to do violence against women. 

Just think about that for a second.

To make matters worse, Noah is a South Asian man and represents a community that is already marginalized in white media and society. Brown men have, in white culture, been relegated to two-dimensional stereotypes, rejected as love interests, and often portrayed as villains, and instead of positively developing an Indian character in a multiracial relationship and using that representation for good, he’s been made to violate his wife and use her to kill another woman. My girl @insidious-intent has written a really fantastic post to that end and I’d encourage you to read it. According to Carina, hiring Karan Oberoi to play Noah was colourblind casting. But viewers aren’t naive enough to buy that it’s ever that simple, or it shouldn’t be. I don’t see how you can write a nonwhite character the same as you would a white one and not expect it to have deeper or more damaging implications.

So my point, or at least one of them, is this: the failure of Roswell New Mexico to its queer viewers isn’t just that they’ve desecrated a ship as sacred as Malex or, at best, totally failed to do it justice. Roswell has failed us by invalidating and retconning female sexuality, and if this isn’t something we should all be angry about, straight and queer viewers alike, I don’t know what to tell you. While people are justified in expressing their anger to Carina about Malex, I think it’s also important to acknowledge and protest JUST AS LOUDLY the queer female angle. When you are thinking about how to represent, express, and phrase your disappointment to the production team, remember this goes far deeper than Malex. She has let us all down in ways that have nothing to do with our ship potentially not becoming a reality by the end of this season. She’s let POC viewers down just as resoundingly hard, both distinctly and factoring in the intersectionality of their writing choices.

All writers make mistakes. I want to put that out there. And I also want to put it out there that the issues around queer and POC representation are serious and disappointing, but not insurmountable if the writing team shows a willingness to learn, improve, and listen if the show is greenlit for season 2. But that isn’t what they’re doing. Carina has taken a stand, via Twitter, that they’ve done nothing wrong, and that is a big red flag that the writing team isn’t as woke as it likes to pretend and definitely not interested in listening to criticisms about their politics or how they try to convey them. So are her efforts of trying to silence bisexual viewers with legitimate criticism, or POC viewers doing the same thing. She and the writers would rather praise themselves for their token representation than acknowledge, listen to, and learn from real people expressing real concerns and sharing lived experiences.

[whovianfeminism]

Whovian Feminism Reviews the New Target Novelizations

I fell in love with the Target Doctor Who novels in the year between when the Classic episodes were taken off of Hulu and when they were finally put back up on BritBox. Trying to catch up on all the stories I hadn’t seen yet — and re-watching some of my favorites — was becoming an insurmountable financial burden. DVDs for individual stories regularly cost anywhere between $15 and $40 (and some out-of-print DVDs could go for as much as $90 on Amazon or eBay). I started combing the local second-hand bookstores to find cheap used DVDs, but oddly, I rarely found any. What I did find were stacks of Target novels — $2 each, or three for $5, and suddenly I had a handful of stories previously out of my reach.

Even though the Classic stories are available for streaming again, I still love collecting and reading the Target novels. So when I heard they were reviving the imprint for novelizations of the modern series, I was ridiculously excited. Instead of waiting for the U.S. release date, my family ordered three of the novels for my birthday from Amazon UK: Rose by Russell T. Davies, The Christmas Invasion by Jenny Colgan, and Twice Upon a Time by Paul Cornell. I read them all in one weekend and then re-read them all again. Each is a delightful novelization that could entirely stand on its own and be appreciated by someone who has never seen its on-screen counterpart. But for those who have already seen the episode, each novelization brings a renewed and deeper appreciation for the on-screen story.

First up was Rose. It’s a hefty novelization that diverges fairly significantly from the on-screen story. The original story is there, to be sure, but Davies has slipped in a few more plot twists to keep even devoted re-watchers on their toes. He’s fully enjoying having absolutely zero time or monetary restrictions to build his new story — to be honest, I’m not even sure he was given a word-count limit. And yet, it never feels tiresome. There is genuine dread and horror at what the Nestene Consciousness is capable of. And even though the reader will likely already know which characters will live and die, there are enough new characters introduced to create a real sense of concern about whether your favorites will survive. 

Davies also goes on significant and lengthy digressions to explore the lives and inner thoughts of these characters. Surprisingly, it’s “Mickey the idiot” who comes out looking the best. Significant care is taken in Rose to explore Mickey’s life and how it influences his world view. He still has his flaws — he’s not the most attentive boyfriend, and he doesn’t react particularly well to the Doctor — but far greater qualities are revealed. Mickey is a man who has lived and suffered and lost most of the people he loved most, and yet all of those experiences have just made him kind. His life in the Powell Estates doesn’t feel stifling to him like it does to Rose, because to him it offers stability and the opportunity to make a new family. He opens his home to anyone who needs one, including three of his friends who don’t feel safe or welcomed in their homes.

Those three friends include a gay man, a trans woman, and another male character who doesn’t explicitly state his sexuality, but does take his first tentative steps towards a relationship with the other man after surviving the Auton attack. And Mickey welcomes them all with open arms. Davies could have left out several pages of additional material and rested on his laurels, and yet he went out of his way to add new characters to make this novelization explicitly, unapologetically queer. 

Next up was Colgan’s novelization of The Christmas Invasion. Personally, I think Colgan is one of the most quietly devastating writers working on Doctor Who right now. I rarely walk away from one of her books or Big Finish audios without feeling deeply upset about something she’s written (in the best way possible!). And The Christmas Invasion gives Colgan a lot of tragedy to work with. By the time that Harriet Jones orders the destruction of the Sycorax ship, you see a fuller impact of the invasion and how many lives were still lost despite the Doctor’s intervention, and the victory over the Sycorax seems even more hollow.

But Rose’s own personal tragedy is the focus here. It’s easy for those of us who have sat through regenerations multiple times to have our empathy for the companions dulled, and The Christmas Invasion is easier than most to mock. After all, the Doctor told Rose what was going to happen to him right before he regenerated. But Rose doesn’t just have to come to terms with what physically happens to the Doctor. She has to work through her own fears and insecurities about how their relationship will change, and whether she’s just permanently lost one of the most important people in her life. It’s another form of grieving, and Colgan handles Rose’s grief beautifully. 

But by far the most tragic scene was right at the end, when Rose leaves with the Doctor again and Jackie is left alone, desperately bustling around her empty apartment and creating as much noise as possible to hide her own sadness. Perhaps this just reflects my own guilt as a daughter who left her mother and travelled very, very far and doesn’t call nearly as often as she should, but damn, that hit me hard.

Finally, there was Cornell’s novelization of Twice Upon A Time. This was actually the first of the novelizations I read. The bittersweet joy of Peter Capaldi’s departure and the pure exhilaration of Jodie Whittaker’s arrival were still so fresh that I couldn’t wait to experience them all over again. And, oh, it was so good. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say I literally sobbed at the end of the book. But thankfully, Cornell kept me laughing all the way through.

Twice Upon A Time’s ending is a tear-jerker, but at its heart, this is a classic multi-Doctor story, full of humor and merciless mocking of each of the Doctors. Every single joke set up by Steven Moffat gets knocked out of the park by Paul Cornell. An anachronistic VHS becomes the Dalek’s missing Master Plan. An off-hand joke comparing the first Doctor to Merry Berry becomes an entirely new side-story about her friendship with the Third Doctor.

One of my greatest disappointments with the televised Twice Upon a Time was that Bill didn’t get a satisfying arc of her own. She existed largely to facilitate the plot, or to assist with the Doctor’s emotional labor towards his regeneration. But in his novelization, Cornell gives Bill the happy ending with Heather that she deserved, full of adventures and cats and love. 

But it’s the regeneration scene that keeps pulling me back to this book. The interior monologue that Cornell creates for the Twelfth Doctor as he decides whether or not to regenerate is so perfect for the moment. It reflects not only on Capaldi and Moffat’s tenure on the show, but also on the pivotal importance of the moment that’s about to come. This is a Doctor who feels trapped in a never-ending cycle, moving from battlefield to battlefield, gaining and losing friends along the way. And he’s doing it all from “basically the same model of body,” because he’s “one of those stuck-in-a-rut Time Lords.” He knows change is necessary, but doubts how much he’s really capable of.

The Doctor’s upcoming regeneration isn’t just a curiosity or a gimmick, it’s necessary, and vital, and a validation of the Twelfth Doctor’s decision to regenerate. The Thirteenth Doctor proves that change is possible, and that even the Doctor can still be surprised by something new and delightfully unexpected.

“Rose” by Russell T. Davies, “The Christmas Invasion” by Jenny T. Colgan, “The Day of the Doctor” by Steven Moffat, “Twice Upon a Time” by Paul Cornell, and “City of Death” by James Goss are currently available in the U.K. and will be released in the U.S. on June 19th. Or, if you’re impatient like me, you can order them through Amazon UK.